Nuclear Theory Seminar

Location: Cyclotron Building (434), Seminar Room


Friday, February 8, 2008, 4:00pm

Dr. Ricardo Rodriguez, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX

Abstract:

The Drell-Yan process has been around since the early 70's. It played a pivotal role in the discovery of J/Psi and Upsilon families. It has been also an important source in the global fits for the parton distribution functions.

Right now this process is being considered in the search of exotic particles like the Z', Higgs and extra dimensions.

Despite all this theoretical and experimental knowledge, the fully angular distribution of the Drell-Yan process has resisted, in the low transverse momentum limit, the QCD treatment. The calculations are divergent!

I will present an introduction and review of the Drell-Yan process and resummation techniques. I will also present a new method that extends the Collins-Soper-Sterman resummation formalism to the longitudinal and double delta helicity structure functions. Surprisingly this method recovers the next-to-leading-order predictions. A modification to the transverse structure function will be also presented.

Another amazing result is the validity, to all orders in perturbation theory, of the Lam-Tung relation. If you like plot spoilers this one will make you happy, much of the above results can be explained just using charge conservation. Thus even in the 21st century the Drell-Yan process keeps us busy discovering its secrets.


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Last updated: Feb/08/08
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